Vegetables can carry the day without doing a meatish drag show.
But what of the beginnings—to come back to the question—the first stirrings in the biological twiglet of evolution, when that splendid solid-state apparatus had not yet developed and a few smallish organic molecules were all that was?
Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye ; but to bring light from obscurity, by whatever labour, must needs to be delightful and rejoicing.
[W]hen the bare boughs of a tree intervened between her and the rising bright but deep red sun, frosted as the twigs were, on them sat a merry flock of sparrows, the feathers on their breasts bluffed out, as if they had donned warm winter spencers to shield them from the biting blast.